Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces

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What is the importance of deconstruction, and the writing of Jacques Derrida in particular, for literary criticism today? Derek Attridge argues that the challenge of Derrida's work for our understanding of literature and its value has still not been fully met, and in this book, which traces a close engagement with Derrida's writing over two decades and reflects an interest in that work going back a further two decades, shows how that work can illuminate a variety of topics.Chapters include an overview of deconstruction as a critical practice today, discussions of the secret, postcolonialism, ethics, literary criticism, jargon, fiction, and photography, and responses to the theoretical writing of Emmanuel Levinas, Roland Barthes, and J. Hillis Miller. Also included is a discussion of the recent reading of Derrida's philosophy as 'radical atheism', and the book ends with a conversation on deconstruction and place with the theorist and critic Jean-Michel Rabate.Running throughout is a concern with the question of responsibility, as exemplified in Derrida's own readings of literary and philosophical texts: responsibility to the work being read, responsibility to the protocols of rational argument, and responsibility to the reader.The end of Romeo and Juliet (quoted from twice in the paragraph) presents a
tableau of dead lovers mirrored in a painting by ... I should have seen it coming,
of course: one of the things Derrida does in this essay is to show how the
question of the ... Indeed, I should have thought more about those cats as cats,
and not just as a convenient example for Derridaa#39; argument about infinite
responsibility.5 Yet itanbsp;...

Title

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Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces

Author

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Derek Attridge

Publisher

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Edinburgh University Press - 2010-05-27

ISBN-13

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